Updating on the spin mop

Hello, everyone.

A year or two back, I mentioned that we'd acquired a spin mop. (The Salad Spinner of floor cleaning!)

Well, it got its feelings hurt that I went out of town for a week and when I got home, DH told me that the fool gadget was failing to spin properly. It's hard to mop floors--or shower walls for that matter--if the mop head doesn't drain properly.

I had recently had no luck at all with a similar mop at a relative's house, so several of the ideas that would have been tried were already eliminated. I decided to fall back on one of the more tried-and-true fixes for sticky devices.

Liquid Wrench, next to the mop head. (Strands removed for the moment.)

 Below, photos of parts that were sticking and needed lubrication.

There is a gear mechanism under the spin basket on the mop. (The gear is outside of the water-containing part of the bucket.) It spins the basket to dry the mop and is worked by a foot pedal at the back of the bucket. This pedal was not moving freely.

The first hint that a gear might be hanging up: teeth. And the pedal was very hard to move.

From another angle, the gear.

I sprayed the teeth that were easily visible, then lifted the mop bucket to get a clear angle of attack on the hidden gear. After squirting it with the Liquid Wrench, a couple of motions of the pedal got the stuff spread around the teeth. A bonus squirt went onto the pin/axle/whatever that goes from the gear up to the spinning basket. The foot pedal was now free to move.

The mop itself was still sticking, so I pulled off the fiber head--it snaps into place--and squirted the top of the mop head where it should be moving. Giving it a test spin by hand demonstrated that it was now moving freely.

Adding lubricant to a stuck mechanism may be so old fashioned as to be a stereotype, but it can often work. And if it works, it's a fairly simple fix and inexpensive to boot.